Submitted 3 weeks ago by Aatube@kbin.melroy.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/cs/features/717322/wikipedia-attacks-neutrality-history-jimmy-wales
The world’s largest encyclopedia became the factual foundation of the web, but now it’s under attack.
Good science is boring, good politics is boring, good espionage is boring, good journalism is boring, good history is boring, good banking is boring, good business is boring. Entertainment serves us this pop view of the world…
But wikipedia is more valuable than all the LLM slop machines combined.
I would love some of those less exciting times.
May you live in exciting times
Is the worst curse
“When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.”
This is so true. These systems that provide the foundation to our daily existence should be all boing, because they should be always working well and never surprise us.
Then everybody would get the chance and energy to pursue excitement in their life’s meaningful parts: having interesting conversations with friends, passionate relationships with their partner, or finding excitement anywhere from horror movies to skydiving.
Move the operations to Denmark. Florida is a fascist sinking state.
WMF has been headquartered in San Francisco since 2007. Not that California's in the US, but much better than Florida.
Not that California’s in the US
I like your attitude!
Boring is subjective.
For me, Wikipedia is a playground.
I hate to say it, but I don’t think Wikipedia is as neutral or as open as it claims to be. Some of the article comments talk about there definitely being some bias against anonymous editors, even if they’re correct.
I’m not sure if it was in that article or in another comment section, but someone said after Elon Musk did the Nazi salute at Trump’s event, an anonymous user mentioned it and there was a big controversy. And a registered user took it down and berated them for it, and another registered user came along an added the salute info back in and it was fine. Or something like that.
I definitely still think Wikipedia is a net good. But it seems to me any time you have a centralised source of information, a small group of people will fight to control the narrative so they can spin it any which way they want. For example, on Reddit, my favorite band’s unofficial subreddit is run by a guy who bans any fan cams of the events — unless they’re his. So obviously he does fan cams so he can make ad money on YouTube, but he uses Reddit to block those of others to direct the traffic to his. I think Fandom (the shitty wiki site with all the ads) run a lot of gaming communities, again, to drive ad revenue. Lot of that shit going on. I mean, if they tried that on Lemmy, someone could just open a community on another instance and the users could then decide who they want to support.
Is Wikipedia susceptible to that kind of influence? Of course it is. And I worry about it being taken over by the wrong people. I don’t think that has happened yet, but I’ve seen it happen on other sites.
To be clear, we should definitely support Wikipedia against the alt right, but we should also be cautious that they, and other bad actors, don’t destroy its credibility from within. Yes, the alt right has their own Wikipedia (Conservapedia or something like that) but that’s not good enough, they want ours to be theirs, too.
I don't see that in the comments and the article said user PickleG13 was the first person to add the salute information. You can also just go check at the Elon Musk article.
I’m not sure if it was in that article or in another comment section, but someone said
a small group of people will fight to control the narrative so they can spin it any which way they want.
Your source for your broad categorization and claims seems incredibly weak. “Someone said, somewhere, I’m not sure where I read it, though.”
Wikipedia tracks anonymous contributions, too. You could check the Article and Article Discussion pages histories before making these claims, and before concluding from one comment that Wikipedia has the same systematic issues like Reddit or other closed-group moderated platforms.
As far as I see it, Wikipedia has a different depth and transparency on guidelines, requirements, open discussion, and actions. It has a lot of additional safeguards compared to something like Reddit. Admins are elected, not “first-come”.
What I find much more plausible than “they didn’t want to accept an anonymous contribution” is that the anonymous contributor may not have adequately sourced their claims and contributions. Even if they did, I find it much more likely that it may have been removed, then a discussion was done in the page discussion, and then it was added back.
Of course, instead of theorizing what happened in that case I could have checked Wikipedia too. But I also want to make a point about my general and systematic expectation of how Wikipedia works, which other platforms do not have.
For your Lemmy example of just opening a community on another instance, is that really any different than on Reddit opening a new sub with a different name? You just need subscribers to migrate, or at least add your sub.
Kinda, sorta, not really.
So on Reddit, the people who run the iPhone subs have iPhone 17, iPhone 18, iPhone 19, and so on registered and they’re squatting on them until they become useful. Or Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout 5, Fallout 6… Now what some people have done is add a word. Like you have the “Cyberpunk” sub and “Low Sodium Cyberpunk.” That works. Or like you have Atheism, and you have RealAtheism. So you can put a word on it, or something like that. But you’ll never be able to be the “original” because a small group of people control those.
Now with Lemmy, those same people will just make those communities on the biggest Lemmy instance, but they won’t do it on all of them. I use Divisions by Zero, which leans a little further left than some of the others, it’s more of a fringe instance I guess? They’re probably not gonna target that. So if someone made a community and tried to divert views to their videos for profit like I said in my example, I could make a community with the exact same name on this instance. The other community probably wouldn’t let me advertise it there. I could do it once and get banned and maybe get a couple people to join both, at least, but I could promote it on neutral ground, and people could decide who they want to support. Because of federation, even if you aren’t on db0, you can still subscribe to a community hosted on it. Like this community is on lemmy.world and I’m subscribed to it and freely commenting on it (at least until/if lemmy.world decides to defederate the instance I’m on — they have that right and ability. But I could make an account on their instance or one that is federated with them. And that’s kosher as far as I know, as long as I myself am following the rules of the instances I post on.
Wikipedia has mountains of useful information, but it is limited and censored when it comes to “controversial” and dissident information, due to it being the status quo and the establishment.
It is known the three-letter agencies have a lot of power controlling and censoring information in media and social media; this includes Wikipedia.
We should always question and be highly critical of these types of organizations and groups, similar to anything politicians and the military spew out.
Thanks for your informative comment; it seems many don’t know or care to question status quo sources and establishment organizations.
Whistleblowers and independent journalists have spoken about this for many years.
Could you elaborate?
You wouldn’t, by any chance, provide examples of that censorship and how it can be traced to FBI/CIA?
did that squabble include moderators or was it just some users? anything will have issues especially on that large of a scale
How do you download the entire Wikipedia? Someone said it was possible to host it and also resources for Anna’s archive and other archive sites.
Apps such as kiwix.org uses the data dumps regularly made available by the Wikimedia Foundation at dumps.wikimedia.org.
The entire Wikipedia might be large, especially with images, but e.g English Wikipedia without images is a couple of 10s of GB.
As of 7 September 2025, there are 7,052,247 articles in the English Wikipedia containing over 4.9 billion words (giving a mean of about 706 words per article). The total number of pages is 63,983,130. Articles make up 11.02 percent of all pages on Wikipedia. As of 16 October 2024, the size of the current version including all articles compressed is about 24.05 GB without media. en.wikipedia.org/…/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia
The following graphic illustrates how large the English Wikipedia might be if the articles (without images and other multimedia content) were to be printed and bound in book form with a format similar to Encyclopædia Britannica. Each volume is assumed to be 25 cm (9.8 in) tall, 5 cm (2.0 in) thick, and containing 1,600,000 words or 8,000,000 characters. The size of this illustration is based upon the live article count manually adjusted by the average word count on an irregular basis on a user subpage of the graphic’s creator Tompw. The growth rate is approximately one full volume every three days if the increase in average article size isn’t accounted for over time. The print volumes as shown in the illustration would take up just over 9.34 m3 (330 cu ft) in total volume.
downloading it is fine but i don’t think the contents of wikipedia are so thoroughly archived that i doubt it will ever become “lost media”
“One of the things I really love about Wikipedia is it forces you to have measured, emotionless conversations with people you disagree with in the name of trying to construct the accurate narrative,”
Yeah, I think what makes Wikipedia resilient is that you can’t just go there and say something subjective. You need to find the correct way to state the actual fact, even when it calls for different interpretations. Cause that way, no group can contest it.
Or they’ll just declare it non-notable and speedily delete it. They’ve lost so many newcomers to internal bullshit like that.
That’s the resiliency part of it all. Resistance to change is the security.
It's not internal bullshits, it's whether there's enough neutral sources to sourceits.
not everything has to be exciting, expanding, growing, “numbers go up” damnit.
just reminding everyone, one donation to wikipedia will hurt leon’s ego. if you want to help a free source of info with no ads, consider donating
Um, just in case, maybe spoiler that? It’s not like that first case was difficult to figure out, but still.
Is it paywalled in some countries? I saw the article when it first went up and it was paywalled then — The Verge restricts new articles to paid subscribers. But after an hour or two it went free to read and the link is fine now. At least from my machine in my location — can’t speak for others and the Archive link is definitely welcome.
Boring is ok for 95% of the things.
Better front-end:
A free open source alternative Wikipedia front-end focused on privacy.
1: You can easily disable JavaScript and still browse Wikipedia without any issue. This also removes all banners, which I assume is what I mean by "ads", which on Wikipedia only appear from time to time and advertise WMF events and donations.
2 and 3: Your IP address is deleted after 3 months, and there's nothing people can do to you just for reading Wikipedia either. Just visiting Wikipedia's servers carries no risk. The exception is if you edit courts could get your personal information when the WMF loses a case, but you can't edit using an open proxy like Wikiless either (because if they allowed you to edit, it would be also be easy for banned editors to edit).
ads? wikipedia has no ads either
Wow, that took me over an hour to read, totally worth it!
Says the rag that survives on drama
what did they ever do since the PC build guide?
Individually, not much. Journalism as a profession, however, has been not so slowly transitioning to sensationalism in lieu of a “just the facts, folks” methodology. Thats what I call living on drama.
Time for some encarta games
I’m sure beer pong is much more exciting than Wikipedia. At least you’re numb from the drinking and laughing at your own stupidity, even though I do that while reading Wikipedia as well.
AmbitiousProcess@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Great article, would highly recommend anyone with the time give it a full read through.
Wikipedia is incredibly valuable, and insanely well edited and put together, and we're all lucky to have something like it available for free.
fluxion@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And their merch is 🔥, just saying.
Tacoma@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Where are the [citation needed] stickers, though?
einkorn@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
They have what?
Here we go! Dang, they even got pins!
pineapplelover@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Yoooo store.wikimedia.org/products/internet-in-a-box
DeadPixel@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Thanks for encouraging to read the whole thing. That is a loooong article! But a great informative read. Took me a couple of sittings to read it all properly, well worth it!
I had no idea about so many of the challenges they’ve gone through & seemingly managed to fight back so many attempts to control & mask the content on more volatile subjects. Always had a lot of respect for the editors, but even more so now.
I do donate a small amount to them once or twice a year. I think I will try to increase my donations going forward knowing it might help with some of their legal fights.
Knowledge really is power, & we all deserve access to true knowledge, more now than ever it seems.
TimewornTraveler@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
CONTINUE READING WITH A VERGE SUBSCRIPTION AND SUCK MY FAT COCK
MDCCCLV@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Lots of it is still pretty shit, but that’s what happens when you have an entry on incredibly obscure things where there’s not a lot of sources information.